Emotional health: Practical strategies for cultivating emotional intelligence in the workplace

We’ve talked about the body — sleep, training, intake. Now it’s time to talk about your mind. Specifically, the emotional health that undergirds all of your human experiences. Nowadays, we talk a lot about mental health. You’ve likely heard about the benefits of meditation and therapy. But have you ever stopped to think about why emotional and mental health is so important? Why do so many leaders burn out (or lash out) when they’re supposed to be performing at their best? Or why sustained stress can make you lose focus, executive functioning, and leadership abilities?

It’s all about emotional intelligence, a framework for emotional health that is measured by your self awareness and emotional regulation.

Self awareness (Noun): Conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings and desires

The value of investing in emotional intelligence is multidimensional. By investing in your emotional health as a leader, you can:

• Improve decision making
• Model healthy team dynamics
• Promote effective communication
• Cultivate curiosity
• Improve team performance
• Enhance sense of well-being (for yourself and on your teams)
• Better manage anxiety and stress

As a leader, you must learn self regulation to make better decisions and communicate in clear, positive, and effective ways to your teams. But the importance of regulation is not just for the individual. Your unconscious patterns influence your behavior which means they also affect company culture. There are two fundamental aspects that make up company culture:

• Cognitive culture: The shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions.
• Emotional culture: The signals and behaviors people consciously practice that influence employee satisfaction, burnout, team dynamics, and even financial performance and absenteeism.

When leaders are not mindful of their company’s cognitive and emotional culture, they lose out on innovation and long-term productivity. Companies with emotionally intelligent cultures are better equipped to solve critical problems, while companies with a culture of groupthink, rely on crude and well-trodden systems of decision-making. As a result, an emotionally intelligent leader should also model a healthy emotional culture for those they lead.

So, how do you become an emotionally intelligent leader? In this chapter, we explain the foundations of emotional intelligence, why it’s critical to dynamic, effective companies, and how you can cultivate and model it for everyone else.

TLDR on emotional health 

Emotional health impacts everything from decision-making to team dynamics — and as a leader you’re the model for what it looks like. By investing in your emotional intelligence, you can foster a positive company culture and enhance your personal performance. Practices like meditation, reflection, and breathwork help manage stress and promote self-awareness, which is crucial in high-pressure situations. Ultimately, recognizing and regulating your emotional state can transform your stress into a powerful motivator instead of a hindrance.

The science of the mind and body

Emotional health really matters, especially for leaders. One in five US adults face a mental health crisis in their lifetime and 40% of adults report suffering from mental health issues. That means either you or those you lead have experienced or are experiencing mental health struggles.

40% of adults report suffering from mental health issue.

Now, you may be tempted to blame the stress of work and life on those mental health struggles. But not all mental health issues are caused by stress, and not all forms of stress are bad for you. Stress is the neutral signal that occurs as a response to perceived threats, challenges, or even exciting events. You and your body can interpret it it positively or negatively depending on your perspective. When you’re stressed, your body releases adrenaline, which releases cortisol, which increases your heart rate, blood pressure, and mental alertness — a boost of “alertness” fuel to handle the situation. In some circumstances, stress can be beneficial, acting as a motivator that sharpens focus and readiness for action. But your body expects it to be temporary.

In the corporate world, stress is often chronic, and can make your emotional health worse. Persistent low-grade stress, if not managed or reframed, can lead to long-term health issues such as anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, and cardiovascular issues. All those factors can impact your performance as a leader and your ability to bring your best to your work. Remember, the mind and body are connected, and chronic stress is our signal that something needs to change.

Chronic stress is a signal something needs to change.

We’ll never be able to remove stress from our lives entirely but we can develop our mind and body connection to better manage it. We can learn to recognize, reframe, and reorient our experience of it.

To better understand the role of stress in your life, memorize the three R’s:

1. Recognize: The first step in managing stress is to recognize its onset by tuning into physical and emotional cues like increased heart rate, feelings of anxiety, or difficulty concentrating.
2. Reframe: Once you’ve recognized how your stress response feels, the next step is to engage in interventions that help you slow down and reconnect with your mind and body (more on that in the next section) before reinterpreting your stress as an energizing force that can motivate constructive action.
3. Reorient: By creating a habit of reframing stress, you can change its impact, potentially reducing its negative effects and preventing it from being a barrier to personal and professional growth.

Changing your perspective on stress can transform your experience from one of paralysis to power, utilizing the body’s natural responses to stress as a resource rather than a hindrance. This can be a challenge for most people, Harvard Business Review did an assessment which revealed that roughly 10% of us can effectively observe our own egos without critique of judgment. In other words, most leaders are pretty bad at self awareness. Thankfully, that’s where reflection comes in, and your most important tool for becoming an emotionally aware leader — curiosity.

Curiosity is your guide. Execs that are curious about their inner worlds are better able to manage the stressors of their outer one. Athletes know this well, as they’re often fighting both their internal state and impossible circumstances to perform. “Once I connected to my mental health, everything else in my life started to fall into place,” decorated Paralympian Brenna Huckaby shared at a STRIVE event. When you are curious about your instinctive reactions to stressors, you’re better able to connect to your body and accept your circumstances and emotions, before shifting your state of mind to more mindfulness. This is the framework for emotional intelligence.

Regulating your nervous system arousal and mindset is the next step. Nervous system arousal is defined as the state of heightened physiological arousal, often referred to as the “fight or flight” response. For better or worse, our mammalian brains struggle to decipher when we’re experiencing “real” threats or “imagined” ones. It’s the difference between actually bombing your board presentation versus the fear of bombing that big presentation, except your brain conflates the two. And so part of the job of emotional intelligence and self regulation is recognizing when your nervous system is activated and moving though the steps necessary to bring yourself back to a regulated state. It’s typically from a regulated state that you can make good business decisions, lead your team effectively, and manage your own stress.

Growing in emotional health requires you to shift your mindset out of patterns of thinking that no longer serve you as a leader. This could look like improving your tolerance for emotional and mental discomfort — like mitigating your instinctive reaction to someone getting promoted over you, or disappointing your mentee. It could even look like doing the right thing, which can trigger negative signals in your brain as well. Similar to the pain of working out a new muscle group, which signals that you’re experiencing growth in your training, recognizing your dysregulation is the first step to managing it. Your mental health journey may feel like you’re moving backwards, even though your awareness of that struggle is a sign of growth.

Suggested interventions to support your emotional health 

The most important relationship you’ll have in your life is with yourself. It is from that relationship, the longest you’ll have with anyone, that you can show up as the best version of yourself in every area of work and life. To begin the journey of emotional intelligence, start with reflection. This requires doing the hardest thing executives need to do: stay still.

Stillness and meditation are two of the most effective ways to improve your emotional health. As Brenna Huckaby shared with Bessemer and the Exos team, “You think so many things in wellness have to be big — you have to get the chiro machine, the red light, you have to do all these things. But some of the most impactful things for mental health and wellness are free. Meditation. Reflection. Journaling.” In fact, meditation—the practice of focusing your mind on non-judgemental self awareness using a combination of mental and physical techniques — can help you reduce anxiety, stress, and improve cognitive ability.

Another method of reflection is journaling. This act of self expression is a tool to improve self awareness and parse through your thoughts. By doing so, in stillness and without judgment, it allows your mind the space to offer your brain creative solutions to problems, to manage anxious thoughts, and to process difficult emotions. Thus, returning you to the busy, noisy world better equipped to manage the complex challenges you face as a leader.

But what happens when you’re overwhelmed in a high-stress environment without time for reflection? That’s when you step back and recognize the two systems of thinking at play. Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, has defined two types of thinking leaders engage in. Type One is your automatic system — it’s full of bias, and relies on patterns. These are your triggered responses. Type Two is your deliberate processing that takes over when you slow down. You can engage Type Two by pausing to reflect in high-stress situations to:

1. Check for vulnerabilities: Before even exploring options and discussing with a group, diagnose how a group could be vulnerable to bias. Unconscious bias crops up most commonly in these situations:

• When a team encounters new circumstances
• When a situation requires discretion
• When a group is working with ambiguous parameters or data
• When decision-makers are stressed in any way

2. Compare and contrast scenarios or sets of information: Valerie Jackson, a seasoned global inclusion and diversity leader, puts it this way, “When evaluating a resume, it’s easy to slip into Type One thinking because of associative bias we all have with titles, schools, and brands. However, if I were to take the resume of another applicant and compare and contrast the two resumes side-by-side, my brain would naturally slow down and trigger Type Two’s deliberate processing. It might only take three extra minutes versus 30 seconds, but this small practice leads to a more thoughtful assessment as opposed to a gut-driven reaction.”

By starting with a solid reflection practice, you set yourself up for better regulation of your nervous system and your emotional and mental state. Stillness and meditation help you slow down and connect with your body and mind, so when you’re in a tense Zoom call, or reacting instinctively during an HR meeting, you’re able to recognize it and do something about it.

The best advice in those moments of stress is to pause and take a breath — even if you feel pressure. Try breathwork, the conscious control of breathing, to initiate a state of bodily awareness. You can pair breathwork with meditation for effective nervous system regulation, as well. Use these practices before a big meeting or whenever you need a moment to reset your mind and body.

Breathwork practices

None is necessarily better than the other. Try all and see what feels more natural.

Diaphragmatic breathing: Also known as abdominal breathing or belly breathing. You can do it either sitting or lying down, just focusing on your belly gently rising with your breath in and falling with your breath out.

Box breathing: Like a box, which has four sides, this technique has four steps: Four counts of breathing in, four counts of holding your breath, four counts of exhaling and four more counts of holding after your exhale.

4-7-8 breathing: The 4-7-8 breathing technique can be done while sitting comfortably or lying down. Inhale for four counts, hold for seven counts, and exhale for eight counts.

Five finger breathing: Place the index finger of your tracing hand at the bottom of the thumb of your base hand and begin slowly moving your index finger up to the tip of your thumb. As you move your finger up your thumb, take a slow breath in, allowing your eyes to close. When you reach the top of your thumb, do the opposite: Slowly drag your index finger down the other side of your thumb while exhaling. Continue with all fingers.

Note: If you want to dedicate more time into breathwork, we recommend downloading apps like Breathwrk. Fitness and health apps such as Headspace, Peloton, including Exos provide these types of guided exercises.

Once you’re feeling more calm — or you have time to reflect — a simple way to recognize what’s activating your stress response is to use the acronym HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. In stressful circumstances, recognizing the cause of your overwhelm—like fatigue or hunger—can help you to address the underlying need and be better prepared to support yourself with prevention or interventions when the circumstances arise again.

Try the 5-4-3-2-1 Method

When your newest project feels overwhelming, when fatigue and hunger press their weight upon you, or when anxious thoughts become overwhelming feelings, you can use the 5-4-3-2-1 method to get grounded again.

Take several deep breaths, and while you do, begin to bring your attention to:

• Five things you see, hear, smell
• Four things you feel on your skin
• Three feelings observed within your body
• Two thoughts you are noticing
• One primary emotion you are experiencing

When we are better connected with our emotional health, we have the power to be better leaders and better communicators. We’re better able to perform in every circumstance. Self awareness and self regulation is where that power comes from. Don’t underestimate the importance of your emotional health on you, and as a result, the entire organization.